Monday, October 20, 2008

Cream rinse and tobacco smoke

This is an entry for the blogathong, which I heard about from Scary Scary Quite Contrary. I don't know many details about it other than people are expected to write a blog a day, Monday to Friday, for the next 21 days. I like that idea. I've been too lazy lately.

The other night, I woke up and said to my wife “The C Game gives it away every time, when you’re Apu.”

Now, we weren’t having a conversation about The Simpsons or cunt games, so I don’t know to what I was referring, but it didn’t make any sense then, and my wife laughed at my incomprehensibility until I went back to sleep.

I must have been dreaming.

Most of the time, I don’t remember my dreams and there’s probably not much point in doing so. Sometimes they play out rather cinematically, and I’ve written down the few dream ideas that might germinate into a full blown story, but, for the most part, I don’t pay much attention, even if I vividly remember a dream upon waking, for the same reason that I don’t try to store my farts for later smelling.

Some things are more beautiful when they’re fleeting, whether it’s dreams or farts.

Sure, you could fart in a jar, and save it for a special occasion, but there’s something visceral in a fart’s transitory existence that makes each one interesting, and the good ones special. Dreams are just another way that your body rewards you by expelling a pleasant concentrated version of all the crap you intake.

It never ceases to amaze me how often most people overlook farts particularly since there is a psychological school that places great importance on people’s dreams. Perhaps I would be more willing to lend their discipline some legitimacy if there was a competing school of psychologists that sniffed gaseous expulsions to determine the root cause of their anxiety or explain why some folks prefer sex with pumpkins instead of people.

Human beings are largely unimpressed with their bodies, and their disinclination to give farting the same status as high minded pursuits like singing, scholastics, or scopophilia is another symptom of our reluctance to trust the corporeal.

Look, our minds are wonderful things. Without them, we would have never discovered all the fun stuff in life, like masturbating, or convincing someone else to masturbate us with their genitals; however, the mind is nothing without the body, but the body can get by without the mind.

Our bodies provide all the thrills in this amusement park of life. Imagine if you went to Six Flags and instead of roller coasters and doughboys all they had were stunt shows, shaved ice, and people in oversized, sweaty costumes. If you have trouble imagining that, just go to Disney World; it’s just like an amusement park, only lame and boring instead of fun and exciting.

More importantly, you can’t trust your mind because it lies all the time; that’s why, when you listen to a recording of your own voice, you can’t believe how awful you sound, when you watch the sex videos you made, with that girl you picked up at the bus station, you can’t believe how bad your form looks, and why when other people see your children, they shudder and vomit.

Our brains trick us all the time; so much so, that there are human beings out there who honestly believe they have experienced a supernatural phenomenon.

Just like a deity’s existence, or the exact number of licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop, there’s no way to prove or disprove the existence of supernatural phenomena; however, we can limit the probability that such things exist by cutting apart the lies that our minds create to keep us happy and well supplied with new information, which is what the mind really wants.

Brains crave information and challenges. Just as your genitals, which are used for fucking or exposing to passersby, get inflamed when they are not put to use; so too does your mind start to throb, pulse, and coat you with sticky liquid in the night if you let it lay fallow. Exercising your brain decreases the chance that you’ll experience supernatural phenomena, which is why the majority of people who believe in ghosts, biblical inerrancy, and an informed, sober electorate making the right choice in a US presidential election, are generally the people who get no mental exercise.

Case in point, how many nuclear physicists have claimed alien abduction? You’d think that visiting aliens would want to learn something useful, not how to rebuild the transmission on a 1969 Dodge Charger and fuck their blood relatives.

There are advantages to letting your brain entertain you; for one, you no longer have to worry about piddling concerns like keeping your underwear skid-stain free, or figure out the answers to all those tough questions such as “What happens to the sun when the giant serpent in the sky eats it?”

One of the biggest drawbacks to completely letting your mind take over is that you no longer posses the ability to distinguish between truth and fiction, you think there are ghosts and conspiracies every where, everyone you meet speaks in soothing voices, and you have to wear one of those uncomfortable white jackets that ties up in the back.

So keep your mind busy, feed it regularly by not only injecting large quantities of knowledge, but analyzing and processing what you read, lick, and hear so that you’re not just an information sponge, but a sponge with a machete.